Capacity Planning for Cloud Platforms, Part 1

What is capacity planning for the cloud, why does this problem matter?

The cloud promises to provide scale-free access to a variety of platforms, services, and infrastructures. This is especially true for customers who want to trade the expensive “cost of assets” and their management for the much smaller “incremental just-in-time” ability to grow their own applications and technologies, as dictated by the requirements of their business. The need for an underlying set of computational resources is common to all of the offerings on cloud ecosystems. Essentially, providers require a solution that can accurately predict the projected levels of demand needs to coincide with current operational processes to aid in capacity planning and load.

Capacity planning for cloud platforms is both similar to and different from “on-premises” capacity planning. It is similar in that we can project our future expectations based upon our current utilization patterns. However, it is different for at least two substantial reasons. Firstly, cloud platforms represent a large, often global network of interconnected devices - this means that accurate forecasts initially require building a map of the network and devices based both upon device hierarchy and device function. Secondly, cloud platforms allow the consumption of each customer to grow while maintaining an environment where many individuals use a set of common and shared resources.

Why consumer behavior matters

As with any business, cloud computing exists because of customers and their ever-changing needs and our goal is to meet those needs. Cloud platforms are massive, globally-distributed computers that customers the world over use to accomplish their goals. The expectations, purchasing behavior, and usage patterns of our customers drive the future of cloud computing. As such, capacity planning must accommodate for different purchasing decisions and subsequent patterns and cycles associated with each cadence. Understanding how our customers use the cloud helps us to better assess how much capacity we can expect to need in the future.

The industry of cloud computing is similar to that of banking, in that banks only have a limited amount of cash on-hand at any given time. In order to finance business activities, banks invest in offering home loans and small business loans using the resources that their customers deposit – recycling of sorts. Similarly, the cloud offers favorable pricing strategies, and the ability to vastly scale for consumers because it is rare that every customer requires the use of all of their resources simultaneously. However, in contrast to a banking institution, our customers do not provide us with the resources we use to grow our platform. Instead, the cloud has a tangible physical limit that is a function of the computational resources available. As a business, we need to understand how this rate relates to our customers’ workloads in order to maintain the highest possible quality of service for all customers. Understanding this rate as well as the total capacity of the platform both factor into future capacity projections.

How we represent the platform

Imagine you are a city planner tasked with figuring out how many roads to build and where to build them. You may approach this situation by examining the growth in the number of new vehicles using roads. However, this still would not tell you where to build the new roads. Instead, you would need to also examine the traffic patterns in a variety of different areas of the city before you knew what to build. Similarly, an accurate representation of overall future growth requires that we start by building a model for each device.

A straightforward technique to represent the growth of a cloud platform would be to project the growth for each device and then determine when we expect each to run out of capacity. However, this approach is not very practical for business. In practice, we often need to “level-up” our analysis to examine sets of devices such as entire racks of devices or even entire data centers full of racks. The need for this level of analysis comes from a couple of different sources.

First, when the business uses this forecast model for procurement reasons, it needs to connect to a plethora of external requirements. From the start, we need to provide enough leeway for the business to obtain capacity ahead of the forecasted demand – this requires connecting the forecast to operations and logistics. Moreover, since logistics and finance ultimately interface with third party suppliers, these forecasts need to consider the vendor constraints such as the typical minimum capacity order to achieve certain pricing thresholds. Considerations such as: performance, price, extensibility, and availability of hardware all influence the likelihood of integration of hardware within the cloud platform.

The cloud is capable of self-healing and of scaling in a variety of ways. We need to account for the interconnection between devices by first modeling them individually and then aggregating these models. In order to know how to combine forecasts from different devices, we need to know how devices relate to one another. To do this we build a virtual reconstruction of the cloud. This requires understanding the set of devices involved in the capacity for each resource type. To understand the present storage capacity we model the set of storage devices. The cloud groups a collection of storage devices together – forming a single entity. The cloud software turns this “cluster of devices” into a cluster of virtual storage partitions. To understand the usage of this cluster, we must understand the usage of each device and the usage of each partition. The cloud platform is constantly changing – as a result, the relationship between devices will differ from day-to-day. We need to be able to reconstruct this representation automatically.

For each low-level device, we then build a forecast model that takes the previous patterns in consumer usage into consideration. Since each device has a separate set of customers, we must consider consumer behavior both at the device level as well as at the global level. Locally, we can model the history of each device. However, as mentioned, the cloud platform is capable of self-healing and it will often load balance across many devices. For this reason, we must modify our expectations of the device-level expectations with the knowledge of global trends taking place. The next section discusses how we build each forecast in more detail.

Test Drive our Cloud Platform

Designed for your business needs today and tomorrow, the CenturyLink Platform is reliable, secure, robust and global.
Get started for free and receive a healthy credit toward any of our products or services. Try our most popular products, or go for another combination of products that works best for your business.

Thank you for your submission. A representative will be reaching out to you within 24 hours.

First Name

Last Name

Email

Phone Number

Company (optional)

Job Title (optional)

Comments (optional)

What type of support do you need?

We have expert agents ready to assist you,
whether you're using Cloud Application Manager or any one of
the services available on the CenturyLink Cloud platform.
Click below to be directed to the appropriate team.